This thread is permanently archived
Dual boot w/o grub?
| Just boot Linux from a usb connected harddrive or a thumbstick using usb3. It's technically not called dual booting but it allows you to boot 2 different OS with little fuss. You can also just connected the other drive trough sata or whatever if you want to just like you said. It works just fine.
| You can't however boot 2 different OS from the same harddrive using different partitions without using grub.
Using usb for linux works fine even on usb2 especially if you use a more lightweight distro than ubuntu. I think ubuntu has an lxde version. You might try that, or puppy linux(if it's still around?).
| >>416722
You can if you have two separate hard drives and bios with EFI boot support. If not then you're out of luck.
| You can install grub itself on a USB. Without installing it on your HDD/SSD, the Windows bootloader would remain intact and would boot Windows without a trace of Linux. When you plug the USB into the computer and boot from the USB, you'll get GRUB which will allow you to chose. When installing linux, make sure you have os-prober available and then just run the grub installation commands on the device representing the USB. There's probably some tutorial online about it.
This thread is permanently archived
| Is it possible to install Ubuntu (or really any other gnu linux distro) on a Windows laptop without grub?
That way, you need to use the BIOS boot menu to be able too boot into Ubuntu instead of via grub.
I just don't want to nake it obvious that the PC has been dualbooted.
Any idea how I'd be able to go about this? TIA